The possible communication with traffic participants, in particular motor vehicle, as well as its increasing configuration for the at least partially automatic operation have led to a plurality of developments for improving the traffic flow control in parking environments. For example, automatic parking garages have been proposed, in which motor vehicles are positioned in a sort of automatic warehouse, wherein motor vehicles, after having been parked in a transfer area, are automatically transferred to the corresponding parking space within the parking garage, in which a central control device of the parking garage correspondingly regulates the traffic of automatized motor vehicles. In order to recover the motor vehicle, the same is also automatically transferred into the transfer area.
For parking environments, in which the traffic participant, in particular motor vehicles, are manually operated, central control devices have also been already proposed, which assign parking spaces to new motor vehicles to be parked, and which transmit instruction information, which may be used by a navigation system on the motor vehicle, to the motor vehicle, by means of a communication link. The instruction information may be used within the motor vehicle for directing the driver to the corresponding parking place.
Finally, it is also already known to influence the parking reassignment and the driving paths in parking environments by means of static and/or controllable traffic influencing devices or traffic influencing systems. Static traffic influencing devices may comprise signs, for example, whereas controllable traffic influencing devices may comprise traffic light systems and/or light barriers. The control may be manually performed, by means of timing circuits and/or depending on measurements by installed sensors, such as parking sensors and/or light barriers.
In this case a drawback is consisted whenever a parking environment has to be used heterogeneously, in particular by manually operated traffic participants (e.g., a first group of traffic participants) and automatically operated (piloted) traffic participants (e.g., a second group of traffic participants). The use of piloted traffic participants is not considered in current concepts of traffic flow/parking control and may cause, due to lack of communication between manually operated and automatically operated traffic participants, to traffic jams, for example, such as a slowing down or blocking of travel paths. An essential aspect of this problem is that the efficacy of measures for controlling the traffic flow/parking assignment is always dependent on the compliance and interpretation by the drivers of the manually operated motor vehicles. Another drawback is that in such heterogeneously used parking environments for piloted traffic participants, in particular motor vehicles, during rush hours, excessive waiting times and similar may be experienced.